"Head" (1968) d/ Bob Rafelson

By 1968, The Monkees, a prefabricated television pop quartet that parodied earlier Brit rockers, The Beatles, had taken their sitcom shtick as far as it was going to go, and with the inevitable cancellation of their show after two seasons (ironically enough,  in 1967 The Monkees records outsold both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones), the boys sat down with director Bob Rafelson and producer Jack Nicholson (who penned the screenplay over a weekend on L.S.D), blew some pot, and the movie, Head, was born.


Never saw Ringo Starr plummet off of a bridge and get rescued by psychedelic mermaids. Just sayin'.
After we see Mickey Dolenz  interrupt a bridge dedication ceremony by abruptly hopping off the handrail into a  muy trippy color filtered rendition of The Porpoise Song (the band's finest moment, IMO) and his suicide attempt is thwarted by a pair of humanitarian aqua-tarts, a groupie kisses each member of the band and declares them "even" before walking out. A Nicholson-penned chant parodies their tv show theme, declaring that the boys are in on the big joke, and as each dramatic vignette unfolds (caught in the middle of a war in a fox hole with no ammunition, wandering aimlessly through the desert, getting pummeled in the ring by Sonny Liston,  being ridiculed by a transvestite waitress...) they manage to break through the manufactured film reality in one way or another, only to be thrust into the next, usually more far out than the last.


Marcia Brady's pink lacy underthings just got slightly moist...
Along the way, they're depicted as dandruff sucked out of the hair of a giant Victor Mature by a vacuum cleaner, they enjoy a hookah party with groovy go-go chicks, get hassled by recurring cops (Logan Ramsey) and caped heavies (Timothy Carey), and after screaming teenagers overwhelm them after a live performance on stage and literally tear them apart, it is revealed that they are only mannekins. Davey Jones does a lively song and dance number with Toni Basil about a son abandoned by his father, and then gets criticized by Frank Zappa with a bovine pal. Michael Nesmith rants about surprise parties and Peter Tork sucker punches women, against his better judgment, of course. In the end, they're unable to escape the trappings of the script and be truly free, so they all jump off the bridge... only to end up in an aquarium tank that's driven off the barren set into storage by the director, Rafelson, himself.


"Atta boy, Mike!!!", sputters Lord High n' Low (Timothy Carey).
You'll see the likes of Dennis Hopper, Annette Funicello, stripper Carol Doda, and Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Nitschke among the film's many cameos. Though The Monkees heyday was before my time (a female cousin of mine from Easton, Pa was one of their hysterical screaming teen proponents of the day, or so I've been told), I discovered their quirky show through syndicated reruns, like many others my age did. Interestingly, I met Peter Tork at an acoustic gig he did at Vintage Vinyl in New Jersey back in the nineties, while I was recovering from yet another case of alcohol poisoning and numbly thumbing through the punk and oi section. Nice guy. A bubbler packed with h.g. frodis (Like the lingo, Dolenz) and this one on the ol' plasma screen makes for a solid experience, serving as irrefutable proof that these guys had evolved into something much deeper than their saccharine prefab origins. Three Wops.


"Hey guys, what are we doin' tryin' to drown, we should be on that train and gone..."

"Mary Jane" (1968) d/ Maury Dexter

Some of you older heads might remember Philly native and bubblegum pop star of the late fifties, Fabiano "Fabian" Forte from his movie work in the early sixties after those mop-topped British Beatle bastards invaded the American music scene, appearing alongside the likes of John Wayne and Bob Hope. Tonight's review, a lost drive-in drugsploitation number, came later, when neither his music nor his movies were in the spotlight anymore. It's too bad, too, because this one is a real pisser that toes the straight laced lines of earlier, equally uninformed anti-pot scare films like Reefer Madness, Marihuana (both 1936) and Assassin of Youth (1937), while making Fabian's character more sympathetic to the edgier pot smoking scene of the day.


"You toke pipe-blasting punks are ruining my Happy Days!", says Gas Station Attendant (Garry Marshall).
Jerry (Michael Margotta) wants to be in with the "In Crowd" at his school in the worst possible way. It just so happens that that particular clique, the "Mary Jane" club, a group of preppies and jocks who secretly blow pot all the time, and wear custom dog tag necklaces with their full name on one side and "Mary Jane" on the other (how conspicuous-like), is run by silver spoon-yapped, jock-asshole-extraordinaire, Jordan Bates (Kevin Coughlin), who doesn't find Jerry very groovy at all, man. To further complicate matters, three kids have just died from this mary-huana stuff via hokey pre-credits stoned balls car crash, and the staff is in cooperation with the local badges to put an end to this rapidly spreading menace, that influences high school kids (who all look mid-twenties, at the least) to commit heinous acts like spraying gas station attendants with hoses, necking on a blanket in the grass, and even pretending to ride amusement park rides while the park is closed... fucking dope fiend kids.


A pinner like this today, cocaine and heroin tomorrow.
Luckily for them, they've got a groovy young art teacher/ football coach named Mr. Blake (Fabian) who's hep enough to have tried grass in college, and always leaves his keys in his convertible, in case, you know, Jerry needs to jack his car and lead cops on a high speed chase with a discarded sack of dope in the back seat, where Phil had hoped to land fellow educator Ms. Holden (Diane McBain), if she wasn't so frigid towards his grass blanket antics. Blake gets framed for the buddha and lands in jail, where he raps with Hymie from Get Smart (Dick Gautier, who co-wrote the movie) and a junkie in withdrawal uses his sweater to hang himself(!). Meanwhile, for his unresponsive peers, Jerry's physically ill from smoking grass, drowning himself in a lake, shoplifting watches, and ultimately, blasting hashish and delivering a package of low grade shwag-weed to some punchy jocks from across town that are expecting Acapulco Gold.Jerry's sympathetic teacher buddy, Blake, bailed out by Holden, intercepts Jordan's drug deal with the local ice cream man (pre-dating Cheech and Chong by some thirteen years by my count!), and takes the stuff to the author-no, he doesn't. Free on bail, he takes the stuff home with him. What follows is a predictable climax, but with an unexpected twist, that I'll leave you to discover for yourselves.


It's a little too late to turn this one loose.
Fabian appeared two years earlier with Vincent Price in Mario Bava's campy mess, Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (1966), while the clubfooted  Coughlin suffered an untimely death at thirty at the hands of a hit-and-run driver, eight years later. Patty "Bad Seed" McCormack appears here as Jordan's sweet blonde arm candy. Besides Gautier and Gary Marshall, who'd also appear in Dick Clark's choice drug opus, Psych-out!, the same year, there are also blink-and-you'll-miss-'em cameos from Terri Garr and Hollywood Squares host Peter Marshall, who also co-wrote the script. Despite the mook-nificently misinformed marijuana un-science abound throughout, there remains a decent movie underneath it all, and on the scale, it inhales and buries a pair of Wops; worth a look if you can hunt down a copy, though I imagine the folks that would appreciate this one the most probably lack the motivation to get off of their asses and find it.


"Bitchslapped by Fabian" is not something you wanna put on your resume', kid.